Henry & Gertrude Massey - Sim Fine Art

1 A Life s Class at Heatherley sHenry & Gertrude Massey2 Breakfast at Heatherley sOverleaf: Henry Massey & model at Heatherley s, with a portrait of wife, courtesy Heatherley s Archive Henry Massey was the last Proprietor Principal of Heatherley s School of Art, London s oldest independent art school. Over 86 years, James Matthews Leigh, Thomas Heatherley, John Crompton and Henry Massey each made a strong professional input into the school while retaining a remarkable continuity in their approach to art education and the school prospered.

2 The school was physically destroyed and closed down in the Second World War and while a merger with the Grosvenor School of Modern Art injected some new life it was short last 40 years, however, have seen the rebirth of a school that Henry Massey and his predecessors would be both amazed and delighted to see. A school that still retains in its Open Studio the traditional French atelier so beloved of Leigh & Massey . A Life s Class at Heatherley sJohn Walton Principal at Heatherley s 1974 - todayWhat do Evelyn Waugh, Mabel Lucie Attwell and Ray Bolger, the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, have in common?

3 They all, at one time or another, took classes at Heatherley s, the oldest independent art school in London, during the gently eccentric and benign reign of Henry and Gertrude Massey , between 1907 and Gibbs Massey , whose kindly sixty-something face peers out proprietorially from a series of publicity photographs taken at Heatherley s in the 1920s, was a man with hard won and wryly expressed views about art and how it should be taught. He d learnt his trade in Paris in the 1880s and wanted to bring the school into line with the best of the modern art schools of Paris.

4 Life at Heatherley s under the Masseys, however, was very much a practical education for students wishing to pursue working careers as artists, rather than a breeding ground for abstract ideas and isms . Art defies convention said Henry , but artists should know where to draw the line . Massey s artistic ambitions had been forged the hard way, very much against the wishes of his solidly middle class family, who nurtured rather different hopes for their son. Massey senior was a schoolfriend of the original and placed the young Henry at the feet of the great bookseller and stationer on leaving school, in the hope that his dream of becoming an artist would fade on exposure to hard work and hard didn t.

5 In fact, as Gertrude , Henry s wife, remembers in her autobiography, the gold sovereign presented to Henry by his new employer on the completion of his first fortnight at work, hung upon his watch-chain for many years, and at length was made into my wedding ring .3 Gertrude Massey - Reflections4 Massey threw up his job and enrolled as an art student at the South Kensington School of Art, reassuring his father that he wanted to become an art master. Henry gained his certificates with distinction, impressing his father so much, that he was permitted to embark upon a veritable odyssey of art training, passing from the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (he was the first student to enrol) to a distinctly spartan spell in a Parisian garret.

6 Massey s father, who kept a very close eye on Henry s finances had asked a friend what was the lowest possible sum on which a young student could live in Paris? to which the answer was five pounds a month . This, according to Gertrude , instilled in her husband a lifetime s habit of frugal living and an intimate knowledge of what made Paris and art students tick. The keynote of the place according to Gertrude , who later revisited her husband s haunts, was dirt .Apart from the grime, it was the informal practicality of the French atelier system, with its emphasis on the life class and practical training from an established artist: that really impressed Massey , who, although determined on a career as an artist at the time, was storing away the teaching methods for use at his own art school, which was later advertised as a Parisian atelier in London.

7 In Paris Henry attended the Acad mie Colarossi founded by the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi. It was in many ways a model for what Heatherley s would become. It was less conservative than the official cole des Beaux Arts, laid great emphasis on Henry Massey - Antwerp Art defies convention, but artists should know where to draw the line 5 Gertrude Massey - Down by the RiverGertrude Massey - Frances Cornford, poetlife drawing from the nude and admitted women students even, later, appointing the young New Zealander, Frances Hodgkins, as a teacher.

8 While there, Massey is known to have spent a summer at the artist s colony at Pont Aven, where he met and became friendly with Paul to Gertrude , it was during this time that the desire to teach art in the Parisian way began to take root, but before these plans could come to fruition, Massey continued to combine study with beginning to ply his trade as an artist, working at studios in Paris and in St Ives, as well as paying homage to the great realist painter Sir Hubert Von Herkomer at his school in Bushey.

9 It was in Hertfordshire that he first encountered a young art student called Gertrude Seth, eight years his junior and very much in awe of the young artist fresh from Paris and his exposure to its dangerous new ideas. In late 19th century Hertfordshire, female art students were not allowed to study from the nude, a situation described as ridiculous by young Gertrude , but under the influence of her husband-to-be, things changed. Henry Massey convinced me as to the necessity of studying from the nude and he insisted that on every possible occasion I should draw from the life.

10 We got our nude class after much persuasion. 6 Henry Massey - Mansion HouseHenry Massey - Parliament SquareMassey s influence on Gertrude s development as an artist was considerable: I owe practically all my art training to him she later wrote, but because of straitened family circumstances, she was forced to earn a commercial living as an artist from the outset, painting portraits of local people. Gertrude s natural inclination was towards the miniature, both in terms of subject matter and, as it turned out, subject.